If you aren’t thinking about branding your current ecommerce business, then you’re not really thinking long-term of the advantages that branding has in really having an edge over your competitors. The biggest brands in the world STILL spend millions of dollars each year in branding strategies. Why? Because they know the value of BRANDING.
OK, so what is branding? Your brand is a message and also a promise to your customers. Your brand is who you are, what your company stands for, why you may be different from your competitors, who you are perceived to be! Your brand is everything. It can keep taking your business to other levels as your brand grows.
So how will you develop or think about your branding strategy? What exactly does branding mean and how can you start branding?
Your brand strategy should be how, what, where and to who you plan to communicate your branding message. Currently, the best way to brand yourself online is through social media, right? This channel allows you to engage directly with consumers.
A growing concern for all online business is managing their online reputation. As review websites have been a resource for consumers to read about what others are saying about you, the social media phenomenon has also taken great part about the conversation that can be had regarding your eCommerce business, how you treat your customers, the quality of your products and much more.
Over the past 2 to 3 years, IRM (internet reputation management) or ORM (online reputation management,) has been a growing sector in the online marketing industry as all business (both on and offline) want to make sure they have a good online reputation where consumers are seeking for opinions before buying from your website.
When it comes to customer complaints, you will always have a few. It is of upmost importance, in todays digital world, that you resolve these issues immediately to avoid any customers going rogue and begin writing negative reviews on websites/blog and sharing their story with their Facebook or Twitter friends.
Nevertheless, this is not to say that the customer may not be right, this is to say that now, more than ever, customer service has to be one (as it always should have been,) top priorities as part of your internet reputation management which goes to the core of your brand and your business.
No matter how much advertising you do to further push sales to your eCommerce website, branding is one of the key components, may be THE key component to long-term success online. As your competitors keep on building websites and popping out of the woodwork, you want to establish not just a website but a BRAND online.
Here we’ll list some ways to keep establishing your brand online and make sure over-time, you establish name recognition.
1. DISPLAY BRANDING: I truly believe this is one of the best branding methods, more so than advertising. Now, essentially, it is advertising but the GOAL, in this case, is more so for branding than advertising. Build a display campaign for the purpose of branding. SO, instead of adding product price, etc to the banners, make sure you add your company name and logo larger than anything else.
For online retailers, managing your brands reputation online is a constant challenge. How can you avoid having a customer leave a negative comment about you on Facebook, Twitter or many of these other social networks where there are thousands of listeners and people searching information about brands, etc.
Inc.com shared an article regarding a company named BeachGody who found a negative comment on the website PissedConsumer.com regarding their company.
“Unethical behavior by Beachbody…watch out!”wrote one customer on PissedConsumer.com, an online forum, in June. The customer railed against the Santa Monica, California — based maker of fitness videos, claiming that it charged for something the customer didn’t intend to order online. In the comment box, Tiana, a customer service representative from Beachbody, wrote, “I’m so sorry to hear that you had a bad experience.” She left her contact information and added, “I would be glad to assist you and help to restore your faith in our company.”
Although social media has been a great way to interact with customers and potential customers, it does bring about a new challenge to many marketers when it comes to protecting your brand and its integrity. Before social media, consumers had the power of word of mouth. With social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, that power of word-of-mouth just multiplied by 1000%.
eMarketer reports, “According to a study from branding agency MiresBall and KRC Research, 40% of brand representatives around the world felt social media posed new challenges to the integrity of their brand. More than a third said that social networking sites affected brands significantly enough to bring about changes in marketing strategy.”
Social media is changing the way a company may be marketing itself. As social media has presents many positives, the social space brings about some negatives of a company forcing marketers to deal more with the public and do some serious reputation management. Many small to medium size businesses currently do not have the resources or put enough emphasis on these channels yet. Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly important to do so, especially for an e-commerce business.
The blogosphere has created a voice for all. With search engines putting more authority on blogs to rank well, especially if a negative blog post has your company’s name or domain name, this creates a big challenge for online marketers as well as damage control for your brand needs to start taking place immediately. The last thing you want is your brands name having negative organic listings in the top 10-20 search results. The truth of the matter is that almost every company will have at least one unsatisfied customer.
These days, everyone is a critic online. In 2009, a study by the Opinion Research Corp found that 84% of Americans say online reviews will influence their purchasing decision. 84% is a huge number to ignore if you think bad reviews won’t really affect sales too much, hu?
Social media has become a crucial factor and a serious decision make for many users who use sites such as Twitter and Facebook as a reference for your business, both in a positive and negative way. Also, many people tend to check out forums to hear the experience of others with your company. Also, in 2008, a piece by the New York Times states, “comScore found that local search for businesses, products and services grew 58 percent last year and reached 15.7 billion searches, more than a tenth of overall search traffic.”
In order to really manage your websites reputation, you really have to know where true influencers are and really be on top of online reputation management which over the past few years has become a whole internet marketing strategy in itself.
Here are a few tips to that can help you with your websites online search reputation:
Aaron Wall, who if you don’t know, is considered to be one of the SEO gurus in the SEO world, put out a great post on his blog titled, “How to Combine Brand & SEO.” If you have an online retail store, besides high volume sales being your goal, the long-term reward and how your company will stay around for a long time is by building a brand, not a website.
I always tell ecommerce merchants their goal should ALWAYS be building a brand, not just a website. The web refreshes itself about every 6 months because the life span of most websites on the web is just that OR LESS. The ecommerce merchants who will make it is those who provide certain things to online consumers such as competitive pricing, good customer service, customer loyalty, etc. All this comes by building your brand up.
If you aren’t thinking about branding your current ecommerce business, then you’re not really thinking long-term of the advantages that branding has in really having an edge over your competitors. The biggest brands in the world STILL spend millions of dollars each year in branding strategies. Why? Because they know the value of BRANDING.
No matter how much advertising you do to further push sales to your eCommerce website, branding is one of the key components, may be THE key component to long-term success online. As your competitors keep on building websites and popping out of the woodwork, you want to establish not just a website but a BRAND online.
